Phantasmagoria

Nathan Pohio 

There is a scene in a movie where for some reason the actor could not show up on the day. So for that scene, a photograph of the actor was used instead, held in front of the camera and moved about appropriately within the frame. It was moved to suggest the action of a character walking down the street. Pretty funny. Absurd even, that such measures were taken to make that reality seem believable.

This glorious story is told by Nathan Pohio. And under the mantle "Phantasmagoria", this young artist continues his exploration of two of his favourite subjects: the idea of the moving image, and the construction of reality in cinema.

He has restricted himself to the space of the domestic interior, as he did in "Sleeper" from 1999. Using only that which surrounds him, he has held in front of his camera an old lenticular (or holograph-like) image of horses, and then carefully and very deliberately rocked it back and forth, up and down. Nathan's is film of gentle movement – full of tender grace and a painterly beauty. Intimacy becomes motion, focus becomes blurred – and everything feels a/drift in suggestion and association. Welcome to phantasmagoria: a headtrip, an apparition, a series of things shifting and seen as in a dream.

Nathan Pohio: selected works

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Asleightofhandmanouvreringofastillimageintosomethingmoving 2006
DVD, 7” LCD screen, player, power supply, edition of 3

 

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Asleightofhandmanouvreringofastillimageintosomethingmoving 2006
DVD, player, data projectors, edition of 3

Nathan would like to acknowledge the Creative New Zealand Screen Innovation Production Fund and Ngai Tahu Development Corporation.

Lonnie Hutchinson 

Lonnie Hutchinson's take on the phantasm is more akin to that of visual fallacy. Untitled (Garden) is an augmented reality work, where virtual objects are presented through hooded binoculars, in a viewing station over real time.

Lonnie's Garden is phantom, a pipe dream. Pigeons glide between trees that look as though they are planted in the gallery. But these trees are tracery cut to patterns Lonnie has gotten us to know – from the tight buds of kowhaiwhai, to the rhythms and geometries of tapa, siapo and weaving. Once paper, these motifs now grow on top of one another stacked in Brancusi-like towers – their reproduction and repetition a grand illusion, intimate in scale. In Phantasmagoria (1), Tahi is their one solid manifestation.

But back to hyper-reality, where Nova Paul (2) has us bird watching. In Hitchcock she notes, birds are talismen of psychic and sexual disturbance – they are symptomatic of an order that has been messed with.
Hutchinson’s Garden, in its simple interplay between a virtual and an actual space tells a similar story of disruption. If we think about where we are here, we may begin to ask what this space was before it was all this. Do the birds come to warn us? To protect us? Or to reveal that this space, this space of art, politics and indigeneity is somehow out of kilter?

Lonnie Hutchinson: selected works

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